Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
from "Mid-Term break", Death of a Naturalist (1966)
Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn,[9] between Castledawson and Toomebridge; he was the first of nine children. In 1953, his family moved to Bellaghy, a few miles away, which is now the family home. His father was Patrick Heaney (d. October 1986),[10] a farmer and cattle dealer, and the eighth child of ten born to James and Sarah Heaney.[11] Patrick was introduced to cattle dealing by his uncles, who raised him after his parents' early deaths.[12] Heaney's mother was Margaret Kathleen McCann (1911–1984), whose relatives worked at a local linen mill.[13][14][15] Heaney remarked on the inner tension between the rural Gaelic past exemplified by his father and the industrialized Ulster exemplified by his mother.[12]
Heaney attended Anahorish Primary School, and won a scholarship to St Columb's College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Derry when he was twelve years old. While studying at St Columb's, Heaney's younger brother Christopher was killed in February 1953 at the age of four in a road accident. The poems "Mid-Term Break" and "The Blackbird of Glanmore" are related to his brother's death.[16][17]
Heaney played Gaelic football for Castledawson GAC, the club in the area of his birth, as a boy, and did not change to Bellaghy when his family moved there.[18] However, he has remarked that he became involved culturally with Bellaghy GAA Club from his late teens, acting in amateur plays and composing treasure hunts for the club.
